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Obama Turns to Congress for Jobs Help

President Obama delivered a speech on the monthly job report on Friday at a factory in Golden Valley, Minn.Credit
Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. —Stung by a new report showing that the nation’s job market is sputtering, President Obama made a new appeal Friday for Congress to enact measures to revive the economy, not only to shake the United States out of its torpor but to act as a buffer against storm clouds in Europe.

In a speech on a factory floor here that mixed familiar proposals with a new sense of foreboding about the coming months, Mr. Obama said that “our economy is still facing some serious headwinds” from high gas prices and the financial crisis in Europe, which he said was “having an impact worldwide and is starting to cast a shadow on our own as well.”

“We’ve got a lot of work to do before we get to where we need to be,” Mr. Obama said to a friendly crowd at a Honeywell plant outside Minneapolis. “The economy is growing again, but it’s not growing as fast as we want it to grow.”

Mr. Obama did not dwell on the unexpectedly bleak May jobs report showing a rise in unemployment and a net gain of only 69,000 jobs, trends that could pose a genuine threat to his re-election hopes. As he has in the past, he searched for a silver lining in the data, noting that the private sector had generated 4.3 million new jobs since the depths of the recession.

With Europe scrambling to avert a calamitous unraveling of the euro, Mr. Obama said Congress needed to pass the remaining provisions in his $447 billion jobs bill to fortify the economy, “in case Europe gets any worse.” Until recently, administration officials had played down Europe’s impact on the recovery in the United States.

It was a subtle yet unmistakable change in tone for a president who has steadfastly maintained since last year that the economy is on the mend, refusing to be spooked by the vagaries of the monthly jobless report, whether good or bad.

“From the moment we first took action to prevent another Great Depression,” Mr. Obama said, “we knew the road to recovery would not be easy, we knew it would take time, we knew there would be ups and downs along the way.”

The president seized on Europe’s woes as an additional goad to Congress to take action on his proposals, saying, “We can’t fully control everything that happens in other parts of the world. But there are plenty of things we can control at home.”

While the global economy is becoming turbulent — not just in Europe, but in China, where growth has also slowed, and India — some economists attributed Friday’s numbers to the impasse in Washington, which they said had stymied fiscal stimulus.

“We’ve really got ourselves to blame,” said Jared Bernstein, former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “This could have been avoided if they took out some insurance against precisely this kind of anemic, fits-and-starts recovery.”

Mr. Bernstein, who is now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said he hoped the president would make that case more forcefully to the American people. “America needs to know why we’re in the situation we’re in,” he said. “This isn’t about Europe. This isn’t about China. This is a self-inflicted wound.”

But the president was no more combative than usual toward the Republican-controlled House, suggesting that the situation is dire enough that it may call for cooperation rather than another round of finger-pointing.

“It’s not lost on anyone that it’s an election year,” Mr. Obama said, prompting scattered chants of “Four More Years” from the audience of 1,700. “I’ve noticed. But we’ve got responsibilities that are bigger than an election.”

In Washington, meanwhile, the two sides in Congress blamed each other for the impasse.

Republicans were quick to attribute the weak economy to what Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican whip, called “a complete lack of leadership from the president and Senate Democrats.”

“Our job creators are looking to Washington for leadership on the economic and fiscal challenges we face, and not a gimmicky to-do list on a Post-it note,” Mr. McCarthy said.

The House speaker, John A. Boehner, said the Republicans would barrel ahead with the kind of legislation that the House has been passing but that has gone nowhere in the Senate, where Democrats are in the majority.

“The House has passed more than 30 jobs bills to expand energy production and approve popular projects like Keystone XL, eliminate excessive federal red tape, repeal laws like Obamacare that are making it harder for small businesses to hire new workers, and more,” he said.

The Republicans are taking the same agenda on the election trail, as their House campaign committee’s message focused on characterizing the Democratic approach as “reckless spending habits” and a “hyper-regulatory regime.”

For its part, the Obama campaign insisted it would not deviate from its current strategy, which combines a robust defense of the president’s economic record with a sustained assault on Mitt Romney. It is airing a $25 million advertising campaign that promotes the auto bailout and the rebound of once-depressed sectors like manufacturing.

The campaign said it would keep aiming at Mr. Romney for his record at the private-equity firm Bain Capital and as governor of Massachusetts. In Florida and Nevada, where the jobless rate is higher than the national average and foreclosures are legion, the campaign plans to highlight differences between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama on housing.

Minnesota is safe ground for Mr. Obama, with a Democratic-leaning population and a jobless rate of less than 6 percent. His speech here began what has become a weekly slog of campaign fund-raisers: on Friday evening three in Minneapolis and three in Chicago, where he will spend the night in his own house.

Veterans have a central place in the president’s job creation plans. Mr. Obama again pushed Congress to pass his Veterans Job Corps, a $1 billion, five-year initiative that aims to help soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan get jobs as police officers, firefighters, rescue workers or national parks rangers.

Mrs. Obama, along with Jill Biden, the wife of the vice president, has prodded private employers like Honeywell to hire 100,000 veterans. Honeywell, administration officials said, responded enthusiastically, hiring more than 900 since 2011. Many returning soldiers, they said, were well trained for the highly technical work in this factory, which makes precision instruments used by the Navy. Mr. Obama toured the plant before his speech.

As part of its latest push, the White House issued a report on the job market for veterans, which officials said contained promising news. The jobless rate for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, which had been 12 percent — well above the national average — has fallen to below 9 percent (the national jobless rate ticked up to 8.2 percent in May).

With little chance of Congressional action on his legislation, Mr. Obama also announced an initiative, under the “We Can’t Wait” label, to help veterans obtain licenses and certification for highly skilled jobs. The measure, the president said, would help 126,000 veterans get the necessary licenses to compete for jobs.

“No one who fights for this country should ever have to fight for a job when they come home,” Mr. Obama said to applause.